Birdsong (14 page)

Stephen sat opposite Isabelle in the train going south towards Soissons and Reims. He felt the simple elation of his victory, the fact that it was he who had won, who had persuaded Isabelle against the weight of convention and sound argument to do the difficult and dangerous thing. And there was the deeper happiness of being with this woman, whom he loved, and the undeniable evidence, for the first time, that she was his. Isabelle smiled, then shook her head incredulously from side to side with closed eyes. When she opened them again they had a look of resignation.

"What will they say? What will he say to Bérard and to his friends?" Her voice was intrigued but not anxious.

"It's not the first time a wife has left her husband." Stephen had no idea what Azaire would say, but he did not feel inclined to imagine. He felt it was important that he and Isabelle concentrate on themselves.

The train was the last of the evening, so they had had little choice of destination. At the station Isabelle had wrapped a shawl over her face, fearing recognition as she clambered on to the train. As it made its way south over the flat landscape, she relaxed; there might be years of regret, but the prospect of immediate drama and reverse had gone.

The train stopped at a dimly lit station and they looked out of the window at a porter unloading mail and pushing a trolley full of boxes to a wooden building that gave on to the empty stockyard. The man's face showed pale in the darkness. Behind him was the ordered black swell of a street, leading uphill into a town where the occasional yellow light showed hazily from behind curtains and shutters. The train shrugged and clanked out of the station and made its way south through the tranquil night. The summer was almost at an end and there was an edge of cold to the air. To the east was the forest of Ardennes, and beyond it the Rhine. After a stop at Reims they followed the line of the Marne through Joinville. Occasionally the gloomy river would be caught by moonlight when the railway traveled alongside before retaking its own course through cuttings and embankments whose high sides enclosed it in darkness.

As they moved south, Isabelle came and sat next to Stephen, resting her head against his body. The rolling motion of the train made her eyes heavy; she slept as it picked out its set course, nosing its way to where the Marne joined the river Meuse, whose course linked Sedan to Verdun--a flat, unargued path through the lowlands of her native country.

She dreamed of pale faces beneath rose-coloured lights; Lisette at the corner of the stairs, the bloodless features in the red glow, a lost girl, and others like her caught in some repeated loop of time, its pattern enforced by the rhythmic motion of the train; many white-skinned faces with dark eyes, staring in disbelief. They stayed in a hotel in the spa town of Plombières. It was a grey building with wrought-iron balconies and thick ivy. Their room was on the first floor; it overlooked a damp garden with a broken summerhouse and a number of outsized cedar trees. Behind the wall at the far end were the baths themselves, whose waters were held to have curative properties for people with rheumatism, chest complaints, and certain diseases of the blood. There were a dozen or so other residents in the hotel, mostly old couples, who ate in the ornate dining room. For the first three days Stephen and Isabelle barely left their room. Isabelle was tired by the journey and the strain of what she had done. She slept in the large wooden bed with its boatshaped ends, and Stephen would sit beside her for hours, reading a book, smoking a cigarette, or standing on the balcony, looking over the peaceful little spa. A shy maid left trays outside their door at dinnertime and hurried back along the passageway. On the third day Stephen went down to the dining room on his own, and sat by the window that overlooked the square. The owner of the hotel brought him a menu.

"Is Madame your wife quite well?" he asked.

"Quite well, thank you. Just a little tired. I expect she'll come down tomorrow." Various residents nodded their greetings to Stephen as they took their places at table. He smiled back and drank from the bottle of wine he had ordered. A waiter brought fish in a heavy cream sauce. Stephen drank again and let himself slip into the tranquil atmosphere of this foreign world: nothing, he imagined, had changed for years in the ordered routine of the hotel, in the thin air or the rich food that was based on recipes from the eighteenth century, or in the probably imaginary qualities of the waters and the genteel, restrictive lives their presumed properties had supported in the town.

On the fourth day Isabelle ventured out with him for a walk. She took his arm like a long-married wife as they explored the streets, sat for a time in an almost grassless park, and drank coffee in a square opposite the boys' school. Stephen was endlessly curious. He asked Isabelle to describe her early life in the smallest detail; he never seemed to tire of stories of her days in Rouen.

"Tell me more about Jeanne."

"I've told you everything I can think of. Now you tell me how you came to be in this place, this institution."

Stephen exhaled slowly. "There's not much to tell. My father worked for the post office in a flat part of England called Lincolnshire. My mother worked in a factory. They were not married, and when she became pregnant he disappeared. I never met him. From what I heard of him later he seemed an ordinary man, someone who took what he could find and preferred not to pay for it."

"Is that what you think is ordinary?"

"It's how people live. My father probably had some charm, though he was not a handsome man, not what you would think of as a seducer. He was just a man who liked women and I should think I have half brothers and sisters in England, though I've never met them. My mother left the factory and went back to live with her parents, who worked in a village. Her father was a farm labourer. My mother eventually got a job in service, as a maid in a big house. Like Marguerite." Isabelle watched Stephen's expression as he spoke. There seemed to be no emotion in his voice, though the line of his jaw had tightened a little.

"But my mother was not a strong character either. When I was a small child I wanted her to prove herself independent of my father, so that he could be dismissed from our minds. In fact she got pregnant again, by someone who worked at the house. She was fond of me but never looked after me much. I was brought up by my grandfather, who taught me to fish and catch rabbits. I was a real farm boy. He also taught me how to steal and how to fight. He was quite young, still in his fifties, and very fit. He regarded it as proper that any labouring man should augment his income in whatever way he could. He would have bare-knuckle fights for money, if enough was offered, and he stole from the larger houses in the district. Mostly food or animals he'd trapped.

"My mother went off with the man she'd met at the house. I heard that they went away to Scotland. Soon after this my grandfather was arrested on some small charge and was sent to prison. Part of his defence was that he needed to stay at home to look after me. The court ordered that I should be taken into a home in the local town, since he was not fit to be my guardian. I'd been quite happy running wild, living with my grandmother, and the next thing I was dressed in a sort of tunic and set to work scrubbing floors and tables in this huge brick building. We had to do lessons as well, something I hadn't done before.

"There are things I remember about the place that will be with me even on the day I die. The smell of the soap that we used to clean the floors and the feel of the uniform against the skin. I remember the big room with a ceiling that was so high it was almost lost to view and the long tables we ate from. I'd been happy enough with my grandmother. I'd never seen so many people in one place before and it seemed to me each one of us was diminished by it. I had feelings of panic when we sat there, as though we were all being reduced to numbers, to ranks of nameless people who were not valued in the eyes of another individual.

"Those of us who had family or people to see were allowed out from time to time. I would spend the day with my grandparents. He was back from prison by now. One day I had a fight with a local boy, and I hurt him much more than I meant to. I can't remember who started the fight or what it was about. It was probably my fault. I remember seeing him sink to the ground and wondering what I had done.

"His parents called the police and there was a fuss. I was sent back to the home because I was too young to stand trial. The incident was reported in the local paper and a man I had never heard of called Vaughan must have read about it. My grandmother was excited because this man was rich and said he wanted to help. He came to see me in the home and talked to me for a long time. He was convinced I was clever and needed to be given a chance to improve myself. He asked if I was willing to let him be appointed my guardian by the court. I'd have done anything to escape from the institution, and my grandparents were happy for someone else to take the responsibility.

"It took a year for all the legal things to be gone through. He was quite well known locally. He'd been a magistrate, but hadn't married or had children himself. He insisted that I go to school during the day and he taught me himself in the evenings. I lived in his house and he somehow procured me a place in the grammar school."

"What's that?"

"A school where they teach you Latin and Greek and history. And how to use a knife and fork."

"Didn't you know how to before?"

"Not with any finesse. But I learned all the lessons they gave me. It was difficult to begin with because I was so far behind. But the teacher was encouraging."

"So he was your great benefactor, like the good genie in a story."

"Yes. Except for one thing. I didn't like him. I thought he would treat me like his son. But he didn't. He just made me work. He was a social reformer of some kind, I suppose, like the priests who went into the slums of London to work with the boys there. I think his interest in my learning was a substitute for other things in life. He never showed me any affection, he just wanted to know how much progress I'd made with my studies."

"But you must have felt grateful to him."

"Yes, I felt grateful. I still do. I write to him from time to time. When I finished at the school he found me an interview for a job with a firm in London who paid for me to go to Paris on their behalf to learn the language and find out more about the textile industry. Then I worked in London, living in lodgings in a place called Holloway. Then I was dispatched to Amiens."

He looked at her with relief. The self-revelation was over. "That's it." Isabelle smiled at him. "That's all? That's all your life? You seem so old to me, I think of you sometimes as being older than I am. It's your eyes, I think. Those big, sad eyes." She stroked his face with the tips of her fingers.

When they returned to the hotel Isabelle went ahead to the bathroom. She noticed with dismay that, despite her elaborate carelessness, the blood had returned at its appointed time.

After a week in Plombières they traveled south. Stephen wrote to his company in London, enclosing his reports and explaining that he would not be returning. In Grenoble they celebrated his twenty-first birthday and he wrote to Vaughan thanking him for his guardianship, which was now ended. They stayed until some money arrived for Isabelle, wired from Rouen by Jeanne, whom she had contacted by letter. Stephen still had two large English bills that had been given to him by his guardian for use in case of emergency.

In October they arrived in St.-Remy-de-Provence, where Isabelle had a cousin on her mother's side. They rented a small house and Isabelle wrote to Marguerite, enclosing some money and asking her to send a trunkful of clothes. She specified exactly which ones she needed; the occasional item purchased en route had been no substitute for the outfits put together so carefully from shops in Amiens, Paris, and Rouen or for the things she had added or sewn herself.

Resplendent again in her oxblood skirt and linen waistcoat, Isabelle read Marguerite's letter to Stephen as they sat over breakfast in the living room overlooking the street.

Dear Madame,

I did not recognize your writing, perhaps you asked Monsieur to write it for you. I have sent the items you requested with this letter. Lisette is very well, thank you, and is being very good to Monsieur and is looking after him very well, she seems happy. Little Grégoire is also well, though he has not been to school every day. I am keeping well though we do miss you terribly, all of us, it's not the same without you. Monsieur and Madame Bérard have been to call on Monsieur most evenings and I sometimes hear the two gentlemen having long conversations. I have done what you asked and not shown your letter to anyone so they won't know that you are in St.-Rémy. I wonder what it is like there and if you are keeping well. Everything is going along fine in the house but we hope you will come back soon. With warm wishes

from Marguerite.

Stephen walked through the streets of the almost-deserted town. The fountain in the square around which people gathered in summer played coldly into its stone basin. The loose shutters on the houses were blown violently back against the buildings by the autumnal wind that was rolling in from the south. Stephen did not mind the feeling of loneliness, nor the tedium that awaited him in his work. He had found a job as an assistant to a furniture maker. He did the preliminary sawing and planing, and was occasionally allowed to do some of the more skilled work in design and carving. At midday he and the other four men employed in the business would go to a bar and smoke and drink pastis. Although he could see they thought him curious and he tried not to outstay his welcome, he was grateful to them for accepting him into their company.

In the evenings Isabelle would prepare dinner from what she could find in the market. She was critical of what was offered. "Rabbit and tomatoes, that's all they seem to eat," she said as she set down a large pot on the table. "At least at home I could have a choice between a dozen different kinds of meat."

"Though Picardy itself is not the gastronomic centre of France," said Stephen.